Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

The Secret Life of Maps

PJ-BN744A_maps_DV_20130416192554That’s not the real title of the exhibition that opens at Winterthur on Saturday. Martin Bruckner, the guest curator of “Common Destinations: Maps in the American Experience,” talks rather about the “social life” of maps. But the exhibit is kind of a coming out for the Winterthur collection — a few of the items in the show have been on view, but it was mostly the maps on ceramics or paintings, that were tucked into the permanent collections rooms. The big paper maps have been tucked away in the library or decorative arts collections.

Winterthur owns about 250 maps now, most purchased after it became a museum — not by the duPonts whose house Winterthur was.

With so many people now using GPS rather than looking at maps, this exhibition is very timely. I write about it and how it came about in today’s Wall Street Journal. Have a look (it’s not behind the paywall).

Meantime, I’m showing a few examples here.

From top to bottom:

1197_1973_0288_002“L’Amerique”: Jean Lattré, Paris, France; from 1779–80 — an “engraving with watercolor on paper, pasteboard, wood, brass: ‘As rare as it is unique, this adaptation of a map into a fashionable fan is only one example of the vast crossover appeal maps had in the 1700s and 1800s.’ ” It’s a cartifact.

A detail from the “Popple Map” – “The largest and perhaps most spectacular one made in the 1700s illustrates the ways in which maps entered American culture. Widely criticized in its own day for misrepresenting the continent’s geography, the Popple map was nevertheless acquired by public institutions and private citizens.”

1197_split_globeA pocket globe, by Holbrooks Apparatus Manufacturing Co. Wethersfield, CT, 1830-59.

 

Photo Credits: Courtesy of Winterthur

On Wisconsin! And Cincinnati And Others

It’s widely recognized now that there’s no one art world, no one art market — and that perhaps is what underpins a couple of recent developments.

Museum of Wisconsin ArtWe’ll start with the news early this month that the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, WI., — which has existed for some 20 years — has a new building that will raise it profile and provide more space for showing art by residents of the state. Art writer Mary Louise Schumacher wrote about it in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

One of the goals of the museum’s new director and CEO, Laurie Winters, is to reconsider how to think about the art of the state and the role that a museum can play. With no major contemporary art institution in the region, save the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, she’s interested in finding ways to cultivate connections with contemporary artists, among other things, and has created an advisory board of working artists, curators and critics.

The JS has a wonderful slide show at the link above, which includes the photo I’ve copied here of Graeme Reid, director of exhibitions, amid an installation by Michael Meilahn.

Today, an article caught my eye about the groundbreaking for a museum in Daytona Beach, FL., that “will house the world’s most extensive collection of Florida art.” A couple named Cici and Hyatt Brown have donated the art they’ve amassed — some 2,600 works — over the years. It’s not contemporary, apparently: The local paper, The Ledger, says the earliest work dates to 1839 — a painting of the gates of St. Augustine, Fl. The Browns gave $13 million for the design and construction of the museum and have just said they will give $2 million to kick off an $8 million endowment campaign. Read more details here.

No. 3 on this list of unrelated developments is a blog post in Houston (ArtAttack on the Houston Press site) proposing that the city needs more museums, including one it would call the The Museum of Texas Art:

You would think we’ve got art covered what with the MFAH’s ever growing campus, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Pearl Fincher Art Museum and the rest, not to mention the hundreds of galleries in the area, but on any given day, you’d be hard-pressed to find an exhibit that included anything that could be called Texas art.

We don’t mean just works by Texas artists or works created here in Texas. It takes a little bit more than that to qualify a painting or sculpture as Texas art. It takes an only-in-Texas vision and direct connection to other local painters and sculptors who either influenced or were influenced by the artist. The Texas Art Museum would have a collection of works by artists such as unique Lone Star state talents as Emma Richardson Cherry, considered one of the most forward thinking artists of her time.

Finally, the other day I received an email from the Cincinnati Art Museum noting that its Cincinnati Wing is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The museum says it was “one of the first art museums in the nation to dedicate permanent gallery space to a community’s art history.” It adds:

The 18,000 square feet of gallery space showcases more than 400 objects that represent art made by Cincinnati or Cincinnati trained artists, art depicting Cincinnati or Cincinnatians, or art commissioned for Cincinnati, including many works by American masters. The artists in the Cincinnati Wing include Frank Duveneck, a painter of international reputation; Hiram Powers, one of the nation’s finest sculptors; John H. Twachtman and Edward Potthast, regarded as two of the finest American Impressionists; Lilly Martin Spencer, the most celebrated female painter of her time; and decorative arts from the internationally renowned Rookwood Pottery.

I couldn’t find a link to the release online, sorry to say.

So there you have it — I align with the Houston blogger, Olivia Flores Alvarez, on this issue. Showing reginally made art is another way museums can differentiate themselves.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Journal Sentinel 

 

 

Noteworthy Acquistions

It’s spring-buying season: several museums in recent days have announced acquisitions (none as gigantic as the Met’s gift from Leonard Lauder, but noteworthy just the same). Here are some of them.

ppppThe Kimbell Art Museum has purchased two big Mayan Palenque-style ceramic censer stands — definitely museum-quality, as they were once, from 1985 to 1999, on long-term loan to the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Kimbell got them from privately: the museum said that they were imported into the U.S. from Mexico with proper documentation on August 6, 1968 and have since been in private collections in Europe and the U.S. No word on who brokered the deals. (Or the costs.)

These works — about 40 inches tall — are “typical of the Maya late Classic period (A.D. 600–900) and dated to about A.D. 690–720.” Censer Stand with the Head of the Jaguar God of the Underworld and Censer Stand with the Head of a Supernatural Being with a Kan Cross (at left) will go on view on Apr. 21. The background from the press release:

Ceramic censers were an important component of ritual paraphernalia and ceremonial life at Palenque [a major Maya city-state located in current-day Chiapas, Mexico]….used both to represent and venerate divine beings, primarily the deities of the Palenque Triad. Censers were in two parts: a stand with a tubular body that served as a support; and a brazier-bowl that was placed on top and used for burning copal incense. While the functional brazier was undecorated (and is now often missing, as is the case with both Kimbell acquisitions), the stands were elaborately embellished with a wide variety of iconographic elements. The thematic arrangement depicted on these two…[is] the “totem-pole” style and is characterized by a vertical tier of heads modeled in deep relief on the front of the cylinder. The side flanges are decorated with motifs of crossed bands, serpent-wing panels, foliation, knotted bands, stylized ear ornaments and pendant ribbons applied in low relief….Though not necessarily conceived as a pair, both censers were undoubtedly made by the same highly skilled court artist.

More details here.

LACMA-AfricanWoodToday, LACMA fired off a release of its own, announcing the most successful Collectors’ Committee fundraiser results: $3.2 million. With it, and including two additional gifts from the evening’s sponsor, the museum has added nine works of art to its collection. They include “one of the oldest surviving wood sculptures from Africa, ancient Korean and Japanese sculptures, as well as modern and contemporary pieces by Thomas Demand, Susan Hefuna, Julio Le Parc, and James Turrell.” Meanwhile, that sponsor, JP Morgan Chase, donated “a photograph by Robert Frank, St. Francis and Gas Station, and City Hall—Los Angeles, from his iconic series The Americans; and a portfolio of seventy-five mixed-media works on paper made by Ed Ruscha in 1969, Stains.”

For more details, you can read the press release or the shorter blog version, which has the benefit of pictures.

The National Gallery of Art’s Collectors Committee has been busy too. Today came word that it had “made possible the acquisition of Piano/Piano (1963–1965/2011) by Richard Artschwager, a major example of the wooden sculptures that employ Formica as a laminate, for which he is known (below left); Plaster Surrogates (1982/1989) by Allan McCollum, the last large grouping available of the artist’s signature works in this series; and Condensation Wall (1963–1966/2013) by Hans Haacke, a breakthrough kinetic work from the artist’s early career.”

The NGA also acquired a work by Rineke Dijkstra and — yes — the same Ruscha that LACMA bought, “Stains (1969) includes 75 sheets of paper stained with 75 different ingredients and represents Ruscha’s first venture in this unusual medium.”

artschwager_lrgDetails are here.

In West Palm Beach, the Norton Museum of Art just said that trustees approved the accession of nine “significant works of art” from area collectors. They include three Italian Old Master paintings: Adam and Eve with the Infant Cain and Abel (1705) by MarcAntonio Franceschini, “a rare example of this artist’s work held in a public collection in the United States;” Saint Onuphrius of Egypt (1545-1550) by Lorenzo Lotto, “a Venetian painter whose work represents an important transition stage to the first Florentine and Roman Mannerists of the 16th century;” andJacob Stealing Isaacs’s Blessings (1780s) by Gaetano Gandolfi, “a Bolognese painter known best for his fluid draftsmanship.” All are gifts from Damon Mezzacappa.

The Norton also received three 20th-century works from trustee Anne Berkley Smith: Richard Diebenkorn’s Mission Landscape, from 1962, and Landscape with Figure, from 1963, and Wayne Thiebaud’s Neapolitan Pie, from 1963. And Beth Rudin DeWoody donated…of Prosperity, from 2011, a sculpture by South African artist Mary Sibande.

The Norton’s Contemporary and Modern Art Council, meanwhile, raised money to acquire Mnemosyne I, a 2012 “monumental” charcoal drawing by Jenny Saville and Lynda Benglis’s Cocoon,  a 1971 work that blurs painting and sculpture.

Back here in New York, the Morgan Library & Museum said it’s getting a gift of 28 letters written by J.D. Salinger from the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York — bringing the total of Salinger letters on Madison Ave. to 52. The gift commemorates the 150th birthday of Swami Vivekananda, who brought Vedanta, the religious and philosophical teachings of India, to the West in 1893. The Morgan says:

J. D. Salinger was deeply influenced by Vedanta and had an enduring relationship with Swami Nikhilananda, founder and spiritual leader of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York. Salinger attended services and classes at the Center in Manhattan, and at the Vivekananda Cottage retreat in New York’s Thousand Island Park….

[Written between 1967 and 2006, the letters] pertain to Salinger’s many donations to the Center over the course of nearly forty years, while others contain reflections on spiritual and other matters.

 Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Kimbell (top), LACMA (middle) and the NGA (bottom)

Strategy: Why Museums Should Develop Specialties

What makes your museum — the one you love, the one you promote, the one you work at, the one you most visit — different? Special?

Some museums are lucky enough to have a true, world-class masterpiece or two — the Frick’s Bellini, MoMA’s Starry Night, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Sunday on La Grande Jatte, etc. Better yet, some museums have specific, unduplicatable collections: If you are interested in Max Beckmann, you really must go to the St. Louis Art Museum, to name one example.

DAMNativeAmTextiles2Back when I wrote a lot about corporations, and more particularly about corporate strategies, this differentiation was a big concern: what made Home Depot different from Lowe’s, or Cover Girl mascara different from Revlon’s? Marketing might do the trick — think Tide detergent’s sales over Cheer’s. But the companies that really did well were those that had more substantive product differentiation.

I thought of that the other day when I got a press release from the Denver Art Museum, announcing a $1.5 million 1 to 1 matching grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the creation of a $3 million endowment of a full-time, permanent textiles conservator, plus $250,000 to support a fellowship in textile conservation. I had already written about SPUN: Adventures in Textiles — the campus-wide docket of exhibitions related to textiles this summer, and I knew that SPUN was triggered by a $3 million gift to the DAM’s textile department.

So I asked the museum, how did the new grant come about? Did it ask the Mellon, was it taking the strategic course to put a lot of muscle into developing its textiles collection?

Indeed, the answer came back — this is not rocket science, but everyday good management — Christoph Heinrich, the museum’s director, and a development official visited Mellon in New York “to tell them about our Textile Art Department expansion and gauge interest in a proposal. They really liked the attention to textile arts, a medium they feel is underserved nationally, and invited us to apply for the grant,” spokeswoman Ashley Pritchard wrote back.

I also asked if I was reading the situation properly: DAM is known for Spanish Colonial art and Native American art, but other departments — which may have interesting pieces — are not considered to be exceptional (excepting British art, thanks to the Berger collection). Was it trying to add textiles to that short list? Again, from Pritchard:

We have a strong core collection of textiles in the textile art department, as well as the textiles held by other curatorial departments (Native Art, most notably). The curator is working to refine the collection – add to strengths, build out in certain areas, etc. We will become nationally known not only for our textile art collection and department but for our commitment to textile art conservation through this endowed position and the fellowship. A fellowship means that we are a center for conservation professional training, especially as it relates to textile art conservation, an underserved area.

This is smart. Especially in contemporary art, many museums have cookie-cutter collections. Textiles is a broad area that few museums focus on.

You can read more, in the museum’s press release on the Mellon grant. And here’s a link to some of the museum’s textiles in Spun – Adventures in Textiles_Image Highlights.

Photo Credit: Native American textiles at DAM, © Judith H. Dobrzynski

 

 

Should We Expect More Museum Cutbacks? — UPDATED

As they always say, if you’ve got three, you’ve got a trend. I have only two, but I wonder if more museum cutbacks are coming. UPDATE –see comment below. Now we do have three examples.

DBolgerBEarlier this week, the Baltimore Museum of Art awarded pink slips to 14 employees, or 9 percent of the 154-member staff., according to The Baltimore Sun. The 14 included 11  full-time exployees and three part-timers. Here’s the background:

The job cuts are needed to make up a projected deficit of more than $500,000 by  July 1, according to museum director Doreen Bolger (left), and to accommodate a budget  that is shrinking by $1 million from its current level of $12.9 million for the  2012-2013 fiscal year.

“We did everything we could think of over the past five years to avoid  reaching this point, including salary reductions, furloughs and trying to find  ways to raise more money,” Bolger said. Bolger said staff cuts were necessary to avoid trimming programs that  directly affect museum visitors. At the moment, there are no plans to reduce  hours.

The museum will also remain free and its renovation will go on. More financial details are here.

You’ll remember that a few weeks ago, the Indianapolis Museum of Art laid off 11% of its staff.

As I recall, charitable donations to the arts rose only slightly last year, though according to a recently released survey in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, 70% of charitable organizations expect a rise in donations this year. I don’t know why they are optimistic, considering that the economy remains weakish, European countries said again recently that they will remain on an austerity kick, and President Obama has declined to drop the idea of a cap on charitable donations by the wealthy — the very ones who give to the arts.

I think this will continue to be a tough year – I’m a contrarian versus that 70%. I do expect more job loses at art museums, whether by layoff or by attrition. I would love to be proven wrong.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Bucknell